Friday, May 30, 2008

Varia...

A homeless woman has been arrested after living undetected for almost a year in a tiny cupboard in a man's house in Japan.The woman, identified as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found by police searching the home of the man, who believed he lived alone in Fukuoka.The resident of the house, who has not been named, became suspicious that he was the victim of repeat burglaries after he noticed food was going missing from his refrigerator.The man decided to install security cameras linked to his mobile phone and on Wednesday caught images of a woman walking around the house while he was out.Believing he had detected the burglar, the man contacted police and, after an exhaustive search of the property, officers found the woman hiding in the top of a built-in cupboard designed to store bedding and mattresses.Behind the sliding door, she had laid out a thin futon and had several plastic drinks bottles, police said. There was just enough room for her to lay down, they added.

The Turin Shroud is to go on public display for the first time in a decade, the Vatican has announced, coinciding with a new set of tests on its age.The Vatican keeps the 14ft by 4ft piece of linen, believed by some to be the death shroud of Jesus, in an aluminium case built by an Italian aerospace company to shut out all light, air and humidity.The case is filled with Argon gas in order to prevent bacteria from eating the material.However, the success of the exhibition of Padre Pio’s remains in Puglia has convinced the Vatican to bring forward the next public showing of the shroud from 2025 to the year after next.The linen has only been put on display five times in the last century and the last time it was exhibited, in 2000, over half a million visitors arrived in Turin in two months.The exhibition will coincide with a new set of scientific tests on the Shroud in order to verify its age. Professor Christopher Ramsey, the head of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator unit, first dated the Shroud to between 1260 and 1390 in tests conducted 20 years ago.

Even though the Shroud is kept in Turin Cathedral, I understand that it is owned by the Holy See rather than the Archdiocese of Turin, so this time, it seems as though the newspaper is not wrong in attributing everything to 'The Vatican'.